I’ve been tossing this idea around for a while, but now I’m at a point where I can actually do it thanks to things in life and business stabilizing a bit. I like to travel, I like work, and I’ve been wanting to hang out with more people in person (sitting in my office alone is great most of the time but other times it bites!), so I figure why not combine the three?

The deal

I come to your office and work for you for any number of days (up to 5) at a flat rate. I’ll hack on code, train your developers, pair program, fold your laundry, up vote all your Hacker News posts, make coffee, conduct dramatic readings from the Gang of Four book, whatever you want me to do. The options are (nearly) limitless.

If you want just 1 day, that’s OK. I plan on giving everyone a good chunk of time before hand to familiarize myself with the code, their business, what they’ll be needing, and so on. I’m not going to walk in on the first day with no clue about your business, spend 6 hours learning stuff, 1 hour contributing, and another hour telling jokes about airline peanuts.

The fee right now will be $2,000 per day, which is basically what I charge for 2 days of time right now at $125/hour. To be clear: I give you a (basically) a day’s worth of time off-site reading documentation, talking to your team, looking at your code, getting familiar with your needs and a day on-site actually doing the work. So, basically you’ll be paying what I charge for remote work, except, you know, on-site. This rate might go up in the next round, I don’t know, but since this is sort of an experiment, I figured I’d just stick with what works right now.

When and how?

Well, I don’t know when exactly. My plan is to go to San Francisco for a week sometime soon and work at least 4 of the days of the week. I’m also considering a run in New York City. If you want 4-5 days, we can work something out where I make a special trip just for you (possibly even to places not in NYC or SF, but we’ll have to talk about that :)), but if you want fewer, we’ll have to try to coordinate dates with others who want fewer also.

So, if you’re a company in San Francisco or New York City and could use a little extra Ruby, Rails, iPhone, or whatever muscle, then get in touch.